


What Is That in Your Bag?

by akitania (spacehairdresser)



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Background Relationships, F/M, Gen, Unreliable Narrator, post-ATWQ, pre-ASOUE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 17:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11064057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehairdresser/pseuds/akitania
Summary: Far from the city and far from a town that was once by the sea, a volunteer taxi driver picks up a mysterious passenger with significant baggage both literal and figurative.[Spoilers forWhy Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?]





	What Is That in Your Bag?

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for... Lemony narration that can be interpreted as mild suicidal ideation.

If you should find yourself on the run from the law, it is helpful to have friends in high places, a phrase which here means that you have spent many nights with a duchess over good conversation and bad card games. It’s best if your friend’s high place is very high indeed in the legal system of your city, county, or fjord, but if you have been unjustly accused of one or several crimes, it’s unlikely that that is where your friend is located. If that is the case, you want to be located in the same place your friend is, but lower.

That was why, after being accused of numerous crimes for which I was not responsible, I was in the duchy of Winnipeg, in disguise as a volunteer taxi driver. It might be more accurate to say that I _was_ a volunteer taxi driver. I drove people around and received no official payment, though I was often given tips. The line between a disguise and reality is often as thin as the line between a pleasant journey by subterranean streetcar and an unfortunate accident or homicide.

The trouble with volunteering as a cab driver when you are in hiding is that there are a great number of people who wish to take taxis, and a taxi will pick up anyone who signals for one. You may find yourself transporting a person who you very much hoped would never see you again.

The best way to counteract this is by having a good disguise, which I did, and to count on the fact that very few people look closely at taxi drivers, volunteer or otherwise. This also means that if you find yourself driving someone who very much hopes they never see you again, they may continue not seeing you.

The woman in the back of my taxi did not look at me more than briefly, even though I had spoken to her. I had told her that my sweetheart had recently had a baby, and even showed her a picture my brother had sent to me. I told her this because it was a part of my disguise, and also because it was true, although perhaps she was not my sweetheart anymore. It depends on how you look at it. Your favorite book does not stop being your favorite book because it broke your heart, but a woman you love is not a book, whatever certain poets might say. A woman you love may choose to spend her life with another man, and she may be right in choosing to do so, and she may have two hundred pages of reasons to do so. If you lost those two hundred pages, or damaged them irreparably with your tears, it would not be the same as losing a person, or damaging them irreparably.

“I need to leave Winnipeg as quickly as possible,” said the woman in the backseat, frowning at the photograph.

“Would you like me to take you to the train station?” I asked. It was what I asked many of my passengers, but I shouldn’t have asked her. In my mirror, I could see her fingers tighten around her purse.

“No,” she said very firmly. “To the harbor. I’ll be taking the ferry.”

The woman in the back of my cab was not wearing a disguise, which made me glad, although at first I thought she might have been another woman disguised as Ellington Feint. She had the essential pieces, very black hair and very green eyes, and eyebrows that coiled over like question marks, but some of the details were wrong. Her nails were not painted black, or any color at all, and she didn’t have a smile that could mean anything. She didn’t have any smile at all, and though I could be wrong, I thought it looked like she hadn’t had one in a while. She wore a smart gray suit and beige shoes that made her look older than she was, or maybe just taller.

I asked myself a question, and it was another one I shouldn’t have asked. I thought, _When did you see her last?_ It was the wrong question because I knew the answer perfectly well, and it’s a waste of time to ask questions to which you already know the answer.

 _Over ten years ago, and she was in handcuffs, and you had just pushed her father into the jaws of a terrible beast,_ I answered myself.

Of course, some might say her father was a terrible beast himself. I thought of a fierce and formidable girl in a very long novel who called herself the daughter of a wolf, and I was happy that Ellington was not in such a sorry state as that girl.

I stopped looking at her in order to watch the road and keep us both out of a very sorry state indeed, so I didn’t see her face when the next song began to to play on the cab’s radio. In her voice, though, it sounded like she was smiling when she said, “This is one of my favorite songs.”

It was one of my favorite songs, too. The melody was slow and sad, but made me think of people making the best of their circumstances, and not wallowing in how slow and sad they were. It was also well-liked by a man and a woman in another sorry state in another novel. Those people met again as adults after not seeing each other since childhood, but I did not wish to use their relationship as a model. It was just comforting to know that a song is of comfort to other people in sorry states or unapologetic nations.

“Have you lived in Winnipeg a long time, Mister…?”

There was a name printed on a paper on the back of my seat. She could have read it.

“I’m a recurring expatriate,” I said, and she made a breathy sound that could have been a laugh. I don’t remember what her laughter sounded like, though, of course, what people sound like is liable to change in over ten years. My voice sounded nothing like it did when I saw her last, for which I am grateful.

“Of Winnipeg?”

“Of several places.”

When I looked in my mirror again, she was gazing out the window as if she were looking at something a long way away, or maybe a long time ago. “I’ve come here a few times for work, but I’ve never found anything remarkable.” I wondered if she’d tried the coffee. “It’s not like I’ve heard it was.”

“What do you do for work?”

Again, her slender fingers tightened on her purse, and because she was taking a longer time to answer than seemed reasonable, I did something very rude and interrupted her before she could say anything. “Ms. Feint,” I said, and then asked the question that is the title of this story.

I watched the road. I didn’t see if her eyes widened or narrowed when I said her name, if her cheeks paled or flushed, or if nothing changed in her face at all.

“My name is Toni Fengillent,” she said as if it didn’t interest her much, “Which you’ll probably agree is better than Filene N. Gottlin, but I had more time to think about it. And what’s in my bag, Mr. Snicket, is a small collection of poison darts.”

I could look back at her now because I had made a quick decision to stop driving at an open space along the curb. My proximity to a fire hydrant would be a problem eventually, but not as big of a problem as it would be if I were suddenly assassinated while the taxi was in motion. Her eyes were looking closely at her hands, which were turning white at the knuckles.

I suspected that she was not planning to suddenly assassinate me, and I also suspected that I wasn't concerned enough about the possibility.

“You said you came here for work. What is it you do, Ms. Fengillent?” I asked again, being polite enough to call her by the name she’d told me, even though she wasn’t returning the favor. “Is it noble work?”

She made that breathy sound again, which was definitely her laugh, and definitely not a laugh at all. “Has anyone ever done noble work with poison darts?”

There has been noble work done with any number of things by any number of people. My sister once used a box of matches to bargain with a dreadful villain, and my brother once used a rusty knife to free the hands of an imperiled associate, and Beatrice once used a Wagnerian aria to keep me awake while I was concussed. “Poison darts are often used for wicked things, but you could be doing something wicked for a righteous purpose.”

Ellington Feint smiled, although it was not the smile I saw behind my eyelids for years after leaving Stain’d-by-the-Sea. People the age she had been then could not smile like that, and many people the age she was now couldn’t, either. “Or perhaps I have no idea, and will be traveling by ferry to meet a stranger to whom I will sell poison darts, and we won’t ask each other any questions. I won’t ask, why do you need these poison darts, and they won’t ask, why is there one less than there should be?”

I asked, “Why is there one less than there should be?”

“Maybe there isn’t,” she said. “I’ll have to check to see if one has been loaded into my gun.” She opened her purse.

The phrase “train of thought” does not necessarily refer to locomotives, but there were several trains of thought running through my head, and one was carrying me back to _The Thistle of the Valley_. Although there were others, they were all traveling along the same track and seemed destined for collision. (Whether or not you believe in destiny, you will find that nothing good will come of having too many trains on one track.)

Carried back to the _Thistle of the Valley_ , I asked myself what I would do differently, or what I should have done differently then. There are times when it is a good idea to wonder about those kinds of things, and times when it isn’t. Most people would agree that in the moments after a woman suggests she plans to kill you with a poison dart would be the latter, but as is so often the case, I couldn’t help myself.

Instead of either killing me or letting me finish my reflection, Ellington said, “Let me see that picture of your daughter again.”

“She isn’t my daughter,” I said, but showed her.

Perhaps my hand was trembling a bit, because her long fingers closed over mine to hold the picture still. “But you love her mother?” she asked, staring at the photograph as if it held some great secret.

 _Always. Continuously. With increasing apprehension, and decreasing hope._ “In the words of the great contemporary poet Bob Hicok,” I said, “I am conspicuously mad in my devotion.”

Hicok also had a lot to say about being with his sweetheart wherever she went. I’d give up almost anything to be able to do the same, but sitting in a cab with Ellington Feint, looking at her look at a picture of Beatrice’s child while my mind was carried back to the day I pushed a man into the jaws of a beast, I thought there might also be something to be said for staying so far away from someone that you never could hurt them.

Ellington’s hair was cut so a fringe ran just across her strange eyebrows, and with her head bowed, it was very difficult to read her expression. “Why not lie?” Her hand was still on mine. “Don’t you think I wouldn't hurt you if you said you were a father?”

I stopped looking at her. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. I watched cars pass and thought about how dull even the newest and cleanest of them looked on a day with so little sun. “Any kind of person can be a father,” I said finally. "In any case, most people believe me to be dead already."

Ellington let go of my hand. She spoke so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her. “I don’t do wicked things just because I want to. I do them, but only when it has become a necessity. Everyone has tried to make me a villain, so I try not to let them. If I do something wicked just because I want to…”

“Do you want to?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything, just sat back and turned so she was also looking out the window. I wondered if she was crying, but knew she wouldn’t want me to know. When I decided she wasn’t going to answer, and she was neither going to load nor fire the gun she claimed to have, I pulled back into the street and resumed my route to the harbor.

“Eventually, you won’t feel like you lost everything,” Ellington said. “Just something.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. This is a phrase that sometimes means that you regret having made a person feel, even for a while, that they have lost everything. It also sometimes means that you didn’t hear what a person said.

“You won’t feel like you lost everything, just something,” she repeated more loudly. “I mean that losing _someone_ isn’t the end of _your_ life, but at the same time—” She broke off, and I could tell now that she was crying, but I pretended I couldn’t. The harbor was in sight, and soon she could take her ferry to meet an unknown person of unknown motives.

I said, “I know what you meant.” It was the least I could know.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading my first, messy attempt at Snicket pastiche! A couple of notes:
> 
> -This Winnipeg is not the Winnipeg you know.
> 
> -"Daughter of a wolf" is, as you will know if you were a musical theatre fan on Tumblr between the years of 2012-2014, in reference to _Les Misérables._ (The book, not the musical.) It's such an overused quote that I only put it in there to set up a joke, but then I ended up cutting the joke and keeping the reference. Sorry.
> 
> -The song playing in the cab is "The Star-Crossed Lovers" by, of course, Duke Ellington. The book Lemony is thinking of is Murakami's _South of the Border, West of the Sun_ , which also includes some dangerous driving practices.
> 
> -The Hicok poem mentioned is "Whither Thou Goest," which is overwhelmingly Lemony/Beatrice.
> 
> -Who's getting the poison darts???? We just don't know.


End file.
